CustomAuthorisationFilterAttribute is an ActionFilterAttribute, the simplest implementation of a filter which does not allow dependencies injected

CustomTypeFilterAttribute is TypeFilterAttribute, a more complex filter which allows dependency injection

CustomApplicationFilter is a filter which uses an extension to add custom middleware to the request chain on demand. It allows dependencies but causes problems with exceptions which occur in the action, masking the stack trace and making it look like all exceptions occur in the middleware

Basic finding are that you should not use custom middleware as filters, since it causes side effects in exception handling in your application.

I like JQuery Datatables. It’s a easy to use JQuery plug-in that allows you to enhance an HTML table to support paging/sorting/filtering and all sorts of functionality with little configuration. It supports server side processing (something I’ve blogged on before) to allow serving large datasets.

But it has some issues.

By default it isn’t responsive and doesn’t play nice with small screens, it’s hard to style if you are using custom styling for your website and it will cause some accessibility issues. Also it needs Javascript, so sites that need to support no-js can’t rely on it for paging large tables.

Since I like the Datatables command patterns for API calls and don’t like duplicating logic, I’ve created this sample projectwhich shows how you can implement your model/view/controller logic and back-end logic to support serving a paged/sorted table both with Datatables and pure HTML GET requests on a page. This cuts down on the amount of logic needed and provides an easy to follow pattern for retrieving and using the paged data.

Even if you do not want to use Datatables it’s always good to use an approach which will be familiar to other developers and have a pattern that encourages code reuse and consistency.

Here’s the sample Person list using Datatables:

Here’s the same page with Javascript disabled using HTML GET requests for paging/sorting:

Datatables provides the quick AJAX redraw of the table with enhanced paging/sorting functions, while the HTML GET provides the non-Javascript support.

To implement this I used a number of classes with generics/abstract methods to allow re-use for different pages/tables:

PagedSortedViewModel – model that can be used for both JSON serialization in Datatable server-side and rendering HTML table.

AbstractPagedSortedRepository – abstract repository class that has a number of virtual and abstract methods, wiring together the queries needed to return the paged/sorted result set so that minimal custom logic is needed for each different table.

I’ve been working in ASP.MVC recently after working in Java for a long time. One of the things that struck me was the common use of session data in web application.

Now I know that people can and do use abuse sessions in Java, but the default routing and ease of access make using it more tempting in ASP.MVC. The standard routing convention of “/Controller/Action/:id” means you need to explicitly code to use RESTful paths that give you multiple IDs in URLs like “order/2/item/3” for non-trivial scenarios, and out of the box convenience methods like “TempData” seem to offer magical persistence between requests. These incentives combine to make using session data the path of least resistance in ASP.MVC.

Any data stored in session is inherently unreliable and use of it makes load balancing and scaling your application much more difficult. Once you use it, each instance of your web application must be able to find the users session data to reliably handle requests. Since it’s now extremely common to use multiple instances even for small applications (irresponsible not to for disaster recovery and redundancy) you will need to think about this before you deploy into production.

It also adds hidden complexity to testing your application. Each endpoint which relies on state stored in session needs to be tested with that application state simulated. This means you have at least two places in your code defining and using the same semi-structured data, which makes your tests complex/fragile and your code harder to maintain.

Once you make using session data part of your architecture it’s very hard to refactor and remove it. That little innocent use of TempData to store details from the last request will spread as Developers think “If it was ok there then it’s ok here…” and “one more can’t hurt” (the broken windows theory). Now your user flows in the web application rely on session stored details to go from screen A to B to C, and refactoring them means re-writing and testing a lot of the view/controller logic to replace the data held in session.

There are acceptable uses for session data in web application, authentication is the obivous one. What they have in common is having alternative flows to cope if session data is not found without breaking functionality.

If you have an over reliance of session in your application you are making a flakey, hard to scale and maintain application that will at best limp into production. At worst it will fall over and take your users data with it.

There are common patterns and methods to avoid needing session data, below are some links to help:

This is an example implementation of JQuery Datatables with server-side processing. The source is here.

Introduction

JQuery Datatables is a great tool, attach it to a table of results and it gives you quick and easy sorting/searching. Against a small dataset this works fine, but once you start to have >1000 records your page load is going to take a long time. To solve this Datatables recommend server-side processing.

This code is an example of implementing server-side processing for an ASP.MVC web appliction, using a generic approach with Linq so that you can re-use it for different entities easily with little code repetition. It also shows an implementation of full word search across all columns, which is something that the Javascript processing version offers but is very tricky to implement on the database side with decent performance. It’s a C# .NET implementation but you can take the interfaces and calls from the controllers and convert the approach for Java or Ruby (missing the nice Linq stuff tho).

The default implementation for creating the Where query (for searching) will only work if you provide a SearchPropertyName for a property that exists in the database that is a concatenation of all the values you want to search in the format displayed.

You can implement and override to use a custom method if your Entity does not support this, here is an example from the Person Entity:

The same is true of the order by query, which may need customisation to sort correctly for data, i.e. dates. Here is an example from the PersonDepartmentListViewRepository, which replaces the formatted date column being formatted with the raw date:

Notes

If you are displaying date values be aware that you will need to format the date for display before returning in JSON, and the date format will affect how you sort the column on the backend as you will need to identify the actual date column property rather than the formated string

For effort and performance you are better off creating view than using complex Linq queries

I had a requirement in a project to create an admin screen to edit reference data used in drop downs for other screens. The drop down options had to be ordered, enabled/disabled and allow users to add new options. Before JQuery I would have implemented this using a very message control with multiple buttons for Enable/Disable/Up/Down, all causing postbacks or using very large amounts of Javascript.

Using JQuery UI Sortable control I was able to do this very cleanly, just two ordered lists setup as connected and some neat Javascript to add/remove. Now I have a very UX friendly drag/drop list that users can re-order the options as they like.

Following on from my earlier post about Microsoft Web Deploy tool I’ve put together a sample solution with MSBuild scripts to build and deploy a web application and a WCF service with environmental configuration, so with a single build you can deploy to multiple environments with the right configuration and no manual config changes.

Previously I couldn’t figure out how to get the environment configuration to work for WCF endpoints and certain settings, but now I’ve got that figured out I would recommend using this over the alternatives (xml transformations, build script copying).

Pre-requisites:

VS 2010 (or latest MSBuild if deploying on server)

Web Deploy tool (included in VS 2010, only needed for server deploy)

MVC3 (included in VS 2010, only needed for server deploy)

The project consists of a Model class library, WCF service and an MVC3 application. The Model has a service reference to the WCF service and a custom settings file, the MVC application references the Model, both the WCF service and MVC application have environment configuration, like appsettings keys, settings sections, endpoint addresses and connectionstrings (in dbproperties.config). The master build script builds the solution and creates the web deployment packages, the Deployer script checks/creates the target host web site in IIS, substitutes the correct environment configuration into the package and deploys.

Important files in the project are:

Parameters.xml – In both web applications, contains the list of environment configuration settings for each app, with a description and instructions for the deployer on how to find/set them (either xpath or simple match substitution)

SrcConfig{env}Kainos.WebBRIC.{app}.SetParameters.xml – Environmental settings used in deployment for app, contains the value to be used for each parameter in Parameters.xml and the target Virtual Directory (deployer will create if does not exist)

You can use the MSBuild Extension Package tasks to do a lot more than I’ve got in the sample, create host headers/app pools and setup the website correctly, but I think in the majority of cases the web site will already exist with correct configuration so this may be redundant. One thing people using the deploy tool need to be aware of is it will delete all files/folders in the existing virtual directory folder which don’t exist in the package, so they will need to backup any log files etc. if they want to keep them after a re-deployment.

Attached zipped solution embedded into word doc, as Posterous will not accept zips.

The titles a bit of a mouth full but I think this is a common requirement for deployments, where a release is built once and then deployed for different environments (e.g. first UAT then Production when finished testing).

When I first used Visual Studio 2010 I noticed the new Web.config.Debug/Web.config.Release transformation and thought it would be a handy feature, but after looking at build/deployment scripts for a project I’ve realised it’s useless for the kind of releases I do. I’ve never deployed directly from Visual Studio, it’s always been build the release via msbuild then copy the release onto target environment and use msbuild to perform deployment tasks. Setting environment specific configuration values was either done manually (nasty) or by xml transformations in msbuild script (messy). Web.config transformations seemed to fix this but require one unacceptable compromise, separate builds per environment for a single release, since the transformation is only applied at on build and it’s apparently not possible to use the same internal targets to transform the configs afterwards for deployments (please correct me if you know how). Since multiple builds makes tracing issues more difficult I wouldn’t want to risk using it.

As an alternative you can use Web Deployment Packages, which build and zip up your web application (asp/mvc/wcf etc.) with a neat script for deploying it straight onto the web server (creating virtual directories automatically) and using a “SetParameters.xml” file to hold environment specific configuration. If in your application you include a file called “parameters.xml” with all environment specific configuration (see here for details) when you build deployment package (by msbuild in the release or right clicking in VS) your “SetParameters.xml” will contain the names/default values of the configuration values. Its then a matter of maintaining environment specific versions of the SetParameters.xml file and using them when deploying the web packages by command line.

See this blog post for details on how to set parameters correctly and get the web deployment package from here.